Generally, in an electrophotographic recording type of an image forming apparatus, a photoconductive drum is irradiated with a laser beam to form an electrostatic latent image. The photoconductive drum forms a toner image by a developing device and transfers the toner image onto a sheet of paper to obtain an image. Furthermore, the image forming apparatus includes a charging device, thereby uniformly charging an electric charge to an outer peripheral surface of the photoconductive drum by the charging device in an axial direction.
Incidentally, in the image forming apparatus of the related art, foreign matter and the like such as discharge products or toner dust that is attached to a discharge electrode of the charging device, sheet fiber and floating matter floated by the flow of wind in a device body are attached to the charging device. When foreign matter is attached to the charging device, an image noise occurs, which causes a decline in the printing quality.